This Guide was written to assist federal judges in managing and resolving federal cases involving international human rights claims, and it provides a comprehensive analysis of all substantive and procedural issues involved. A detailed analysis is provided on the Alien Tort Statute, Torture Victim Protection Act, and other federal statutes. The book also includes a model scheduling order for human rights cases as well as case summaries, tables, and research references.

The Guide was drafted to be neutral as between human rights plaintiffs and defendants, and thus should provide useful information for all. Because it was commissioned by a federal government agency (the FJC) for the benefit of federal judges, lawyers, and agencies, the Guide has been placed in the public domain and is available as a free resource. Readers can freely distribute, print, and otherwise use and transmit the Guide in its present form, provided that no changes are made to the manuscript itself.

What rules of transjudicial communication govern the international criminal tribunals’ invocation of the European Court of Human Rights’ jurisprudence? What parameters should guide the assessments of inter-curial cross-referencing and on what basis can the specific instances thereof be deemed appropriate or otherwise? In tackling these questions, the present chapter seeks to make a methodological contribution to the debate on judicial cross-fertilization in the area of human rights, although the findings may be of a more general application. The horizontal and discretionary character of transjudicial communication does not – and should not – mean that it is free from any (informal) conventions, and that the recipient court can treat the donor court’s case law the way it pleases. Although broader extra-judicial objectives are sometimes attributed to the cross-fertilization practice, no valid benchmarks can be derived from them such that could be deployed in categorising any inter-systemic transposition of legal tests either as ‘use’ or ‘abuse’. Instead, one should look to how the recipient court identifies, construes, adjusts, and applies foreign rationes: it is the method that matters. Transjudicial cross-referencing is motivated primarily by the recipient court’s aspiration to enhance the quality of its legal analyses and persuasiveness of its reasoning. Thus, any appraisal of this practice should consider, at least, whether it is in fact capable of promoting that goal. The chapter identifies, and demonstrates with examples from jurisprudence, four basic rules of ‘transjudicial grammar’ that international criminal judges should respect when relying on Strasbourg human rights tests. It also reflects on the potential consequences of failing to abide by those rules by way of gauging their deterrent potential.

In the context of the debate on the relationship between EU and international law, it has been observed in the literature that the Court’s approach to international law seems to have shifted over time. It has been argued that, although in its earlier case-law the Court seemed to have adopted a friendly and open attitude towards international law, more recent case-law evidences a more reserved, inward-looking attitude and a tendency to eschew engagement therewith. In this context, the Court’s judgment in Front Polisario is highly relevant since the Court relied heavily on international rules on treaty interpretation and, thus, the judgment provides important insights into how the Court treats international law in its practice. This Article discusses the findings of the Court and argues that the Court’s reliance on international law was artificial and selective. The Article concludes by arguing that, ultimately, the Front Polisario judgment lends evidentiary force to critical voices in the literature that have casted doubt on the image of the EU, as evidenced by the jurisprudence of its principal judicial organ, as an actor maintaining a distinctive commitment to international law.

In the 19th century neutrality was a highly appreciated concept. In the 20th century it has widely lost relevance and in principle it should be incompatible with UN membership. However, also under the UN system some states have opted for neutrality and it can be argued that there is still space for this status within the universal peace order. In fact, this peace order is far from perfect. There are several lacunae in the prohibition of the use of force and this concept is open to different interpretations. New threats, such as international terrorism, are emerging that could threaten the absolute prohibition of the use of force. It is contended here that neutrals could play an important role when it comes to find an interpretation of this prohibition that best could reconcile the goals of peace and security with the overall - still imperfect - structure of the UN system. These questions are analysed with primary reference to Austrian neutrality which on the hand seems obsolete but on the other is forcefully looking for a new meaning.

The American Society of International Law calls for submissions of scholarly paper proposals for the ASIL Research Forum to be held during the ASIL Midyear Meeting in St. Louis, Missouri at Washington University School of Law.

The Research Forum, a Society initiative introduced in 2011, aims to provide a setting for the presentation and focused discussion of works-in-progress. All ASIL members are invited to attend the Forum, whether presenting a paper or not.

Papers may be on any topic related to international and transnational law and should be unpublished (for purposes of the call, publication to an electronic database such as SSRN is not considered publication). Interdisciplinary projects, empirical studies, and jointly authored papers are welcome.

Proposals should be submitted via the form here by June 26, 2017. Interested paper-givers should submit an abstract (no more than 500 words in length) summarizing the scholarly paper to be presented at the Forum. Abstracts will be considered via a blind review process. Papers that do not follow these guidelines will not be considered. Notifications of acceptance will go out by the end of July.

Papers accepted for presentation will be assembled into panels. The organizers welcome volunteers to serve as discussants who will comment on the papers. All authors of accepted papers will be required to submit a draft paper four weeks before the Research Forum (September 29, 2017). Accepted authors must commit to being present on both Friday, October 27 and Saturday, October 28, 2017. Draft papers will be posted in advance of the Forum on an asil.org website accessible only by attendees of the Forum.

An international public debate over the law and ethics of autonomous weapon systems (AWS) has been underway since 2012, with those urging legal regulation of AWS under existing principles and requirements of the international law of armed conflict, on the one side, in argument with opponents who favor, instead, a preemptive international treaty ban on all such weapons, on the other. This Chapter provides an introduction to this international debate, offering the main arguments on each side. These include disputes over defining an AWS, the morality and law of automated targeting and target selection by machine, and the interaction of humans and machines in the context of lethal weapons of war. Although the Chapter concludes that a categorical ban on AWS is unjustified morally and legally — favoring the law of armed conflict’s existing case-by-case legal evaluation — it offers an exposition of arguments on each side of the AWS issue.

This innovative book proposes a fundamental rethink of the consensual foundation of arbitration and argues that it should become the default mode of resolution in international commercial disputes.
The book first discusses the most important arguments against this proposal and responds to them. In particular, it addresses the issue of the legitimacy of arbitrators and the compatibility of the idea with guarantees afforded by European human rights law and US constitutional law. The book then presents several models of non-consensual arbitration that could be implemented to afford neutral adjudication in disputes between parties originating from different jurisdictions, to offer an additional alternative forum in the doctrine of forum non conveniens or to save judicial costs.

This paper is part of an interdisciplinary project on 'Norm Robustness and Contestation', convened Nicole Deitelhoff and Lisbet Zimmermann. Using the example of the right to self-defense under customary international law, we engage with questions concerning the linkage between norm robustness and legality. We draw out important differences between validity contestation and applicatory contestation within law. In so doing, we connect the IR debate over norm robustness with our framework of interactional international law, bringing together constructivist insights into social normativity and a theory of international legality. We hypothesize that norms that meet the requirements of legality and are upheld by practices of legality enjoy 'validity' and 'facticity' (as defined by Deitelhoff and Zimmermann), and are 'robust.' This model reveals that law operates through a continuing process of contestation. The requirements of legality impose a discipline, such that legal contestation will normally be applicatory contestation. Through practices of legality, therefore, legal norms can be maintained or shifted. However, legal norms may decay when practices of legality weaken, or when challenges amount to validity contestation. The currently heightened contestation surrounding the circumstances under which the right to self-defense can be exercised against non-state actors allows exploration and illustration of these dynamics.

On June 29-July 1, 2017, the University of Reading's School of Law and Walker Institute and the American Society of International Law's Disaster Law Interest Group will hold a symposium on "Disaster Risk Reduction and International Law," in Reading. The program is here. Here's the idea:

The international community is grappling with the increasing frequency and severity of a broad range of ‘man-made’ and ‘natural’ disasters, through initiatives such as the Sendai Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030, Sustainable Development Goals 2015, and UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The current global landscape governing disaster risk reduction (DRR) is therefore in a significant period of evolution. It is likely that the reach of DRR will extend into many different legal regimes, both in the development of ‘soft’ (non-binding policy) and ‘hard’ (formally binding) law governing a broad range of disasters.

The bilateral investment treaties (BITs) signed between developed and developing countries are supposed to increase the flow of investment from the former to the latter. But the evidence indicates that the existing approach of guaranteeing special protections for foreign investors has only a modest impact on luring their dollars. At the same time they are failing to produce meaningful benefits, these treaty commitments create substantial costs for the host states that make them, exposing them to liability and constraining their regulatory authority. Given this state of imbalance, the time seems ripe for a new approach, but existing proposals for revising BITs are either insufficient or unrealistic, or in some instances even counterproductive.

This Article calls for a fundamental redesign of BITs based on empirically validated premises about how host states actually attract foreign investment. Political science and economic studies show that foreign investors place substantial weight on the quality of domestic institutions. Existing BITs fail to promote investment because they are not an adequate substitute for these institutions, nor are they effective in generating reform. The proposed model would make domestic institutional reform the organizing principle of BIT design, and the Article offers several specific provisions that would help achieve that goal. Such an approach would produce immediate benefits for host states and so should be particularly attractive to developing countries. But the institutional reform model also retains the end goal shared by both sides of increasing foreign investment and so should be more realistically attainable than proposals pitched as benefiting developing states alone.

The federal courts are often accused of being too parochial, favoring U.S. parties over foreigners and U.S. law over relevant foreign or international law. According to what this Article terms the “parochial critique,” the courts’ U.S.-centrism generates unnecessary friction with allies, regulatory conflict, and access-to-justice gaps. This parochialism is assumed to reflect the preferences of individual judges: persuade judges to like international law and transnational cases better, the standard story goes, and the courts will reach more cosmopolitan results.

This Article challenges that assumption. I argue instead that parochial doctrines can develop even in the absence of parochial judges. Our sometimes-parochial procedure may be the unintended result of decisionmaking pressures that mount over time within poorly designed doctrines. As such, it reflects not so much the personal views of individual judges but the limits of institutional capacity, the realities of behavioral decisionmaking, and the path dependence of the common law. This Article shows how open-ended decisionmaking in the midst of complexity encourages the use of heuristics that tend to emphasize the local, the familiar, and the concrete. These decisionmaking shortcuts, by disfavoring the foreign, put a parochial thumb on the scale—but that tilt is not limited to individual cases. Rather, it is locked in and amplified through the accumulation of precedent, as later judges rely on existing decisions to resolve new cases. Over time, even judges with positive conceptions of international law and transnational order will find themselves, in applying these doctrines, consistently favoring U.S. litigants over foreigners and U.S. law over foreign or international law.

To explore this theory, this Article traces the evolution of four procedural doctrines: discovery of foreign evidence, forum non conveniens, service of process abroad, and the recognition of foreign judgments. The decisionmaking pressures outlined here can explain why the first two doctrines (framed as open-ended standards) are often criticized as parochial while the latter two (framed in more rule-like terms) are not. And if that account is at least plausible, it supports the primary claim of this Article: the occasional parochialism of our courts does not necessarily reflect the personal prejudices of our judges. If so, then avoiding the costs of parochialism will require structural, not just personal, solutions.

Both statutes and treaties are the “supreme law of the land,” and yet quite
different practices have developed with respect to their implementation. For
statutes, all three branches have embraced the development of administrative
law, which allows the executive branch to translate broad statutory directives
into enforceable obligations. But for treaties, there is a far more cumbersome
process. Unless a treaty provision contains language that courts interpret to be
directly enforceable, they will deem it to require implementing legislation from
Congress. This Article explores and challenges the perplexing disparity between
the administration of statutes and treaties. It shows that the conventional
assumption that Congress must implement treaties that are not directly
enforceable by courts stems from an unduly narrow historical perspective. Instead,
largely forgotten nineteenth-century practice and cases reveal that the
executive branch can implement treaties so as to make them enforceable in the
courts. Drawing on this past practice, this Article argues that it is time to
reconfigure the administration of treaties. In at least some circumstances, the
executive branch should be able to translate treaty provisions into court-enforceable
obligations in a manner comparable to the statutory context, including
through rulemaking by administrative agencies. This approach is
particularly desirable for multilateral regulatory treaties, which have come to
play an increasingly important role in global governance.

A call for papers has been issued for the Seventh Annual Junior Faculty Forum for International Law, convened by Dino Kritsiotis (Univ. of Nottingham - Law), Anne Orford (Univ. of Melbourne - Law), and J.H.H. Weiler (New York Univ. - Law). The Seventh Forum will be held at the University of Melbourne on May 28-30, 2018. The closing deadline for applications is December 15, 2017. The full call is here.

The “Global Citizenship Law” Project, co-hosted by the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and the European University Institute, is seeking to appoint a Research Fellow (Ph.D. Candidate) in the field of “International Law and Governance of Citizenship.” The deadline is July 31, 2017.
Details about the Ph.D. vacancy are available here. Details about the project are available here.

Sunday, June 18, 2017

The ASIL-Midwest, an interest group of the American Society of International Law, has issued a call for papers for its annual works-in-progress workshop, to take place September 15-16, 2017, in Cleveland. Here's the call:

ASIL-Midwest is co-sponsoring its fourth scholarly works-in-progress conference at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law in Cleveland, Ohio on September 15-16, 2017. The goal is to create a friendly, open conversation about works in progress and to foster a Midwestern United States international law community. To that end, the workshop will include both full drafts and early works in progress.

Those interested in presenting at the conference should send a 500-word abstract to ASIL-Midwest Co-Chair Cindy Buys (cbuys@siu.edu) by Friday, July 28, 2017. Please also include a sentence about the stage the paper is expected to be in by September (e.g., reasonably complete draft, early work in progress, etc.). Papers may address any International Law topics, and this Call for Submissions is open to everyone in the international legal community. Preference will be given to ASIL members who are also members of the ASIL-Midwest Interest Group. Paper presenters will be asked to circulate their drafts (or a summary of the project if it's early stage) to workshop attendees no later than September 1, 2017.

Those interested in serving as a commentator for a paper should also send an email to the Co-Chair Cindy Buys by July 28 (cbuys@siu.edu). Commentators will be asked to prepare five to eight minutes of comments on one or more of the papers. Those interested in presenting are also encouraged to comment on the other papers and should indicate whether they are willing to serve as commentators as well.

ASIL members and Cleveland-Marshall College of Law faculty, staff, and students may attend for free. Participants who are not ASIL members or Cleveland-Marshall College of Law affiliates will be required to pay a $50 registration fee (includes workshop and some meals) for the conference. Some meals will be provided, but participants are responsible for their own travel and hotel expenses. More details regarding transportation, hotels and other logistics will be provided shortly.

In this contribution to a forthcoming handbook on global constitutionalism, we outline our interactional approach to international law. We then connect that approach to ‘circular,’ practice-oriented and interpretative understandings of the rule of law. We go on to show how those conceptions of the rule of law can help to support a limited ‘constitutionalism’ that is still at a nascent stage in international society. We argue that a constitutionalism that is expressed primarily through the rule of law is more open to diversity than might at first appear to be the case; indeed, we suggest that it is likely to be more open than forms of political constitutionalism that focus on constituent power.